Legendary Away Days: The Complete Guide to Running Successful Team Events

Neil Currant (University of Bradford, Bradford, UK)

Industrial and Commercial Training

ISSN: 0019-7858

Article publication date: 1 January 2005

217

Keywords

Citation

Currant, N. (2005), "Legendary Away Days: The Complete Guide to Running Successful Team Events", Industrial and Commercial Training, Vol. 37 No. 1, pp. 52-52. https://doi.org/10.1108/00197850510577159

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2005, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Legendary Away Days is aimed at anyone who will be responsible for organising or running team away days. This book will be an invaluable guide for those trainers and developers who are organising their first few such events. However, it will appeal less to those with more experience at running team events.

The book has a clear structure that lets you delve in at any point and easily find the relevant piece of information that you want. There are lots of bullets points and sub‐headings that emphasises the fact that it is a guidebook rather than a textbook. It is organised into four parts. The first part deals with the prior planning for the event. The authors have split this process down into two stages. The initial stage looks at the reasons for running the event and gets you to think about the broad issues involved in planning team events. The second stage takes you through the detailed planning, such as choosing the right venue, equipment, insurance and even dress codes! A lot of this information will be pretty self evident to those with any experience in this area.

The second part, called “essential information”, deals with various issues that need to be considered on the day of the event. The authors tackle topics such as diversity, health and safety and using facilitators to the best effect. Again at lot of this is obvious, although there are still a few useful ideas for the more experienced. The authors provide a lot of checklists for things to be wary of but do not go into much background detail on any of the areas in this section. There are also a few ideas (11 in total) for icebreakers, energisers and team building activities; nothing particularly exciting but maybe useful if you are really stuck for ideas. This is where presumably the companion book, Games for Legendary Away Days by the same authors and publisher, comes into play.

The bulk of the book comes is contained in part 3 which consists of outline plans for different types of away day. So, you may be planning a celebration day, a creativity day or any away day to serve nine other purposes, this is the section you need. Each type of away day has its own chapter that considers: when to use such a day, the pitfalls, an outline for the day with objectives and room layout ideas. Obviously, these outlines have had to be kept fairly generic in order to allow you to adapt them for your own precise purpose.

The final part has a very short section on evaluation and then fourteen appendices that include various photocopiable sheets for pre and post event.

There is a lot of focus on simple issues such as equipment problems compared to the amount devoted to more complex issues such as diversity and dealing with emotion. This book is a practical and comprehensive guide, to running away days particularly useful for those with little experience of running such events.

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